Dr. Mariya Lesiv is an Assistant Professor of Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. She speaks about her experiences in Kiev in 2006 during a celebration marking Ukraine’s then 15-year independence from the Soviet Union, which inspired her to write “The Return of Ancestral Gods.” She talks about the political unrest that existed in Ukraine post-WWII, when many Ukrainians fled due to the fear of having their culture in the hands of Nazis and Soviets. She looks at the subsequent crash of the Soviet Union that instigated a religious revival and a rise in Ukrainian paganism with a desire to connect to an alternative sense of self-identity. She also talks about the typical problems that modern pagans across the world have with Christianity and the spread of Western hegemony.